Category Archive 'Russian Attack on Ukraine'
22 Feb 2023
Ukrainian girl inspects destroyed Russian tank last October.
Anatol Lieven
A year ago, all but one of Russia’s chief aims in Ukraine were defeated in the first three weeks of the war, before the arrival of Western heavy weaponry. The reasons for this comprehensive Russian reverse — which no Western observer, including myself, predicted — are of great interest to military analysts, even if some of the lessons they teach are very old ones.
Between the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, and the middle of March, Russian forces failed to take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv; failed to take Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, though it is less than 20 miles from the Russian frontier; failed to occupy the whole of the Donbas; and failed to capture Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The only Russian bridgehead established west of the Dnieper River, at Kherson, was so limited that it ultimately proved untenable.
The only major objective that the Russians did achieve was to capture the “land bridge” between Russia and Crimea. Even so, the capture of Mariupol took another two months and involved the complete destruction of the city. The diversion of troops necessary for the siege of Mariupol made it impossible to sustain offensives elsewhere.
The errors in initial Russian planning and strategy are now glaringly obvious. Russian intelligence completely underestimated the strength of Ukrainian resistance — or if any of their predictions were accurate, they either never reached Putin or were ignored by him. In addition, it seems likely that it was fear of the domestic political reaction that led Putin not to call up additional reservists for the “Special Military Operation.”
As a result, Russia invaded Ukraine (a country of 230,000 square miles and 41 million people) with barely 200,000 troops and seven different objectives. So while the Russian armed forces as a whole were much larger than those of Ukraine, in practice Russian troops were often outnumbered by the Ukrainians they were facing. This disparity grew as Ukraine called up every man that it could during the summer, while Putin hesitated for seven months to carry out even a partial mobilization in Russia.
Until October 2022 no supreme commander was appointed for the operation — perhaps because Putin feared the emergence of a victorious general who might challenge his own power. So there were serious problems of coordination between the different Russian fronts. This may have contributed to some appalling failures of staff work and logistics, such as the 40-mile-long traffic jam of Russian vehicles that built up on a single road north of Kyiv.
Russian command-and-control problems must have been worsened significantly by the number of senior officers killed by Ukrainian missile and artillery strikes in the first months of the war. U.S. technical intelligence was largely responsible for identifying local Russian headquarters. Like the strike on Makiivka over the New Year that killed dozens (or possibly hundreds) of Russian troops, these successes may also have been enabled by poor communications security on the Russian side.
U.S. satellite intelligence spotted Russian military build-ups and allowed the Ukrainians to anticipate Russian attacks. Ukrainian civilians in Russian-held areas were also able to simply call Ukrainian forces on their cell phones and tell them where Russian convoys were to be found. This in turn partly contributed to the atrocities against civilians committed by Russian soldiers, which have done so much to tarnish the image of the Russian army.
Despite all this, and despite longstanding and well-known problems with the poor quality of NCOs and lack of initiative on the part of junior officers, the Russian army might have been expected to do better. This was because of the colossal Russian superiority in the two weapons of the classical “Blitzkrieg,” as practiced by Germany in 1939-42, the Soviet Union in 1942-45, and Israel in most of its wars: armor and airpower. The failure of these two arms is perhaps the most striking lesson of the war in Ukraine so far, and indicates that Ukrainian hopes that Western tanks and warplanes will allow them to break through may also be misplaced. Their failure has also led to immense casualties among Russia’s best infantry units.
RTWT
10 Feb 2023
Joseph Kulve puts the pompous pundit [name omitted] in his place, and takes a good shot at the Orcophile delusions of a number of people on the Buchananite Paleocon Right.
In 2015 in China, an American friend “Showman” (my nickname for him, similar to his real name), a self-styled expert on Russia, was always telling us fellow expats about how Putin had done so much for Russia. He loved Russia and Putin. He spoke broken Russian and almost no Chinese (after 20+ years in Russia and China). At that time I spoke fluent Russian and good Chinese. But he was the acknowledged Russia and China expert by expat friends and foreign visitors.
The only time I ever remember Showman losing composure was when a Finnish engineer, commenting on the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, recounted how his grandfather, a combat veteran of the Russian invasion of Finland, summed up how to deal with Russia. His grandpa’s words sum up perfectly the real Russia and how the West should deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
His grandpa killed many Russians in WW II (who were badly armed and forced at gunpoint to charge enemy lines just like now in Ukraine). He suffered greatly from what he did. Yet he told his grandson quite simply how to deal with Russians: “If they ever come again, kill them.” Read the rest of this entry »
08 Feb 2023
Anti-American “journalist” Seymour Hersh expects to whip up a frenzy of indignation by leaking how we blew up the Nordstream pipeline. I was myself all smiles reading the story. Yay, US! Even the Biden-Harris Administration can, once in a blue moon, get something right.
Go wet your bed, Seymour.
21 Nov 2022
John Wolfstahl agrees with Secretary of Defense Austin that defending Ukraine against Russian Nuclear Intimidation is not only a local strategic goal, but desirable in deterring in advance nuclear blackmail world-wide.
]t was with some interest that I heard Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speculate i]this weekend that a Russian victory over Ukraine could lead to greater proliferation of nuclear weapons.
I have heard defense officials, including prior Secretaries of Defense, make such assertions in the past so I tend to view them with skepticism. In this case, however, Secretary Austin is on to something. …
Russia has not just invaded a sovereign country. It did not just annex territory of a state whose borders it had pledged to respect. And it did not just annex land from a state that agreed to free itself of legacy Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory in 1991 and return them to Russia as the USSR’s designated successor state.
No, Russia has done all of this while threatening to use its nuclear weapons against states who might come to Ukraine defense and to insulate itself against counter-attacks. Moscow under Putin has done more than weaponize risk. Russia in this campaign has undermined the hard-earned norm against threatening to use nuclear weapons for territorial aggression and sought to use its nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which it could pursue an invasion, commit war crimes, and destabilize a continent for its own benefit. Protestations that any reference to nuclear weapons have been misunderstood aside, Russia under Putin has become the kind of state we have worried might develop in North Korea or Iran. Many analysts have expressed concern for years that North Korea in particular was a threat because it was an anti-status quo state that might try to use its nuclear weapons to carry out sub-strategic attacks against South Korea, and that it might miscalculate that their nuclear deterrent might protect them in the event it attacked the South from an American response.
Instead, Russia is the one who underestimated its own capabilities and now is dragging the world closer to the nuclear brink. And thus Austin was right to note one of the very tangible reasons why the United States should remain so committed to both deterring Russia nuclear use and ensuring Ukraine prevails. If Russia can hide behind its nuclear shield and prevent America and NATO from bringing many of their conventional advantages into the conflict, than others may see a similar path to victory against a stronger, more capable military adversary. If Russia – the second-best army in Ukraine[1] – can hold America and NATO at arm’s length while gobbling up a neighbor, then maybe other states will follow suit. It is likely this would influence nuclear decision making among US friends and allies. I think this is a lesser danger for US allies and treaty partners, however, since Putin has attacked many states but none of them US allies proper because he knows the risk. And there is a good argument that the depth and strength of NATO’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has likely done wonders for the credibility of the alliance, as evidenced by Finland and Sweden’s desire to join NATO as rapidly as possible.
But for the potential aggressors out there, states whose leaders are unaccountable and who may have territorial or strategic ambitions, the lure of nuclear weapons has always been balanced by the costs of going nuclear, both economically and politically. But if Russia can invade a state in the face of a much stronger set of conventional adversaries and get away with it because it has nuclear weapons, then the prospects that other states might up their interest in nuclear weapons should be a concern. And Secretary Austin put this in a way that was not overstated and did not suggest this was an on-off switch kind of decision.
This gets to the follow-on point that Austin did not make but that he might have/should have. If Ukraine can defeat Putin (defined as expelling him from all Ukrainian territory taken, at least since February) and avoid Putin escalating with nuclear weapons, then the United States will have done something both unlikely and important – demonstrate that nuclear weapons are much less useful as a tool for conventional military conquest than some might have believed, perhaps even unusable. Avoiding nuclear escalation by Russia is a key U.S. objective not only because of the horrors a nuclear strike would cause, or because it would likely draw the U.S. and NATO in the conflict with uncertain consequences. It matters because perhaps the only way Putin can avoid defeat is through nuclear escalation – nuclear use by Moscow is perhaps the easiest way for him to end a losing campaign and force a stalemate by going over the heads of the Ukrainians and raising the stakes for the west as high as he has raised them for himself. Put another way . . . keeping the Ukraine war conventional is the best way to beat Putin.
RTWT
I agree, and I think he is correct in noting that Russia’s attack on Ukraine must be opposed for being an absolutely outrageous violation of the post-WWII understanding that there should be no alteration of European borders by force.
On top of which, Russia’s perfidy in breaking its 1994 pledge to not only respect, but to defend, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and its flagrant resort to shameless lying represents exactly the same kind of gangsterish behavior characteristic of Nazi Germany, and both offenses against decency and the international Order absolutely require opposition.
04 Nov 2022
I recommend muting the soundtrack.
14 Oct 2022
Russian Forces Retreating From Ukrainian Counter-Offensive.
Adam Roach answers an interesting question on Quora.
Russia is known as one of the biggest arms manufacturers, and they have no problem sending old equipment to the battlefield, yet reports say the lack equipment in the Ukranian war, where did all of their weapons go?
There are a couple of things at play in this.
On paper, Russia had one of the largest militaries in the world. In every metric. Manpower, tanks, airplanes, artillery pieces, ships, helicopters and missiles.
So factor 1; Russia just lied.
Russia claimed to have 900,000 troops at the beginning of the war. They put about a third of that number on Ukraine but then lacked reinforcements and fresh troops to rotate the tired guys out.
In NATO it’s not uncommon to have 3 backfield support guys for every frontline soldier but that’s not how Russia is set up. If it was it would have much better logistics.
Currently the rest of Russia is thin on troops. This seems confirmed by non partisan satellite imaging and actual Intel reports. Not to mention Russian citizens on Telegram. So either they lied or they have an awful lot of troops concentrated in very strange places.
While this doesn’t seem to impact actual weapons at first, it really does.
The Russians claim to operate more than a thousand fixed wing military aircraft. Only the US has more but, for instance, the US Air Force has 5000 aircraft and 400 ICBMs. To maintain all of that the Air Force has about a half a million employees in various roles and types of employment. 99% of whom are backfield support.
Most US planes are ready to go at any moment. Which is what happens when 25+ guys are tasked with keeping a single plane up and running.
Just given Russia’s published manpower numbers and assuming a somewhat similar civilian role involvement. Russia doesn’t have nearly enough people to keep its planes in the air. That is assuming Russia hasn’t fudged their manpower numbers and they absolutely have. Read the rest of this entry »
11 Oct 2022
Victor Vasnetsov, Baptism of Prince Vladimir, 1885-1893.
Tim Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s view of History, and territorial claims based thereon, are utter and complete nonsense.
Crimea is a district of Ukraine, as recognized by international law, and by treaties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Putin, however, has taken the view, for more than a decade now, that international law must yield to what he calls “civilization,” meaning his eccentric understanding of the past. The annoying features of the world that do not fit his scheme of the past are classified as alien, and illegitimate, and subject to destruction (Ukraine, for example).
The example of Crimea lays bare a problem within Putin’s thinking. The idea that there is some sort of immutable “civilization,” outside of time and human agency, always turns out to be based upon nothing. In the case of Crimea, Putin’s notion that the peninsula was “always” Russia is absurd, in almost more ways than one can count.
The Crimean Peninsula has been around for quite a long time, and Russia is a recent creation. What Putin has in mind when he speaks of eternity and is the baptism of a ruler of Kyiv, Valdimar, in 988. From this moment of purity, we are to understand, arose a timeless reality of Russian Crimea (and a Russian Ukraine). which we all must accept or be subject to violence. Crimea becomes “holy.”
It takes time to recount even a small portion of the ways in which this is nonsensical. First of all, the historical event itself is not at all clear. One source says that Valdimar was baptized in Crimea, as Putin likes to say; others that he was baptized in Kyiv. None of the sources date from the period itself, and so we cannot be certain that it took place at all, let alone of the locale. (If Valdimar was indeed baptized in Crimea, Putin’s logic would seem to suggest that the peninsula belongs to modern Greece, since the presumed site was part of Byzantium at the time.)
Valdimar was, to put it gently, not a Russian. There were no Russians at the time. He was the leader of a clan of Scandinavian warlords who had established a state in Kyiv, having wrenched the city from the control of Khazars. His clan was settling down, and the conversion to Christianity was part of the effort to build a state. It was called “Rus,” apparently from a Finnish word for the slavetrading company that brought the Vikings to Kyiv in the first place. It was not called “Rus” because of anything to do with today’s Russia — nor could it have been, since there was no Russia then, and no state would bear that name for another seven hundred years. Moscow, the city, did not exist at the time.
Baptism, whatever its other merits, does not create some kind of timeless continuum of power over whatever range of territory some later figure chooses to designate. If it did, international relations would certainly look very different. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Roman Empire controlled what is now Portugal, Spain, France, the Balkans, Israel, Turkey, North Africa… But we would be very surprised to hear an Italian leader (even now) cite Constantine’s baptism to claim all of these countries.
To take an example of another east European baptism: at the moment when the Lithuanian grand duke converted to Christianity, he ruled not only today’s Lithuania, but also what is now Belarus, most of what is now Ukraine, and a portion of what is now Russia. By way of baptism in 1386 he was able to marry the Polish king (who was a girl) and take the Polish crown. The Lithuanians at the time were also deeply engaged in Crimea, fighting the Crimean Khanate. Taking advantage of fractures and power struggles, the Lithuanians integrated sizable numbers of Crimean Tatars into their own armed forces, and allowed them and their descendants to settle in Lithuania, to enter commercial trades (such as tanning), to build mosques, and to print holy books.
In 1410, when the Lithuanian Grand Duke defeated the Teutonic Knights in the famous battle of Grünwald, some of his fighters were Crimean Tatars. Ostroh, in what is now Ukraine, is known as the place where the first slavonic bible was published, but it was also the site of a mosque for Crimean Tatars. Navahrudak, in what is now Belarus, is the birthplace of the famous Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz; it too was the site of a mosque for Crimean Tatars. In my office I have a printed edition of a kitab, a Crimean Tatar prayer book from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, using Arabic script, but in a Polish-Belarusian language with Turkish phrases. Its first words, enticingly, are “This is the key to heaven.” It bespeaks a coherent Crimean Tatar culture that endured for centuries extended well beyond the borders of the Crimean Khanate itself.
I like to think that this Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian-Crimean history is worth knowing — I am busily teaching it — but if the Lithuanian president were to proclaim today that Jogaila’s baptism in 1386 somehow gave him the right to rule Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and its Crimean province, we would be puzzled.
In one respect, though, our imaginary Italian or Lithuanian claims are less nonsensical than the Russian one. Even if we were to accept every other Putinesque oddity, including the profound fallacy of the legitimation of present borders by ancient baptisms, we would be brought to a halt by geography. Putin’s mythical structure is based upon the restoration of Rus, an east European entity centered in Kyiv whose high point was a thousand years ago. The Lithuanian and Italian governments are based in Vilnius and Rome, which were also the ancient capitals. Putin is talking about a state that is distant not only in time but in space. Moscow was not the capital of Rus; it did not exist when Valdimar was baptized.
RTWT
Really, it’s the other way around. If we are going by History, Ukraine belongs to Poland (or Lithuania), and “Russia” (i.e. Moscow) belongs to Kiev (i.e. Ukraine).
Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted in the 'Russian Attack on Ukraine' Category.
/div>
Feeds
|
(@bayraktar_1love) 
